A magisterial study of how pro football surpassed college gridiron and then baseball to become America’s leading sport. Key to the league’s success was its collegial business administration. For example, TV revenues are pooled and shared, so that competitive merit is the distinguishing characteristic. In earlier postwar years, visiting teams received a share of the gate. The chronology includes closeup views of the Rams, Browns, Colts, Cowboys, Chiefs, and Raiders. Technology and savvy use of electronic media played a key role, as did the accidental commissioner Pete Rozelle. TV, including Monday Night Football, also was a key driver — the NFL supplanted boxing and mastered the medium long before baseball grasped the possibilities. Football gained from the shifting cultural mores of the 1960s, but did not escape labor problems of the 1980s and 90s. The draft remains a key source of talent and public interest, although the rival AFL used superabundance of talent (athletes) to its advantage. The NFL now is an economic and social phenomenon as much as it is a sporting contest.
National Football League
6. Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered (20 Apr 2007)
A well-researched and strongly narrated biography of iconic Green Bay Packers coach Vince Lombardi. The New Yorker’s rise to national prominence was slow, but included a playing career at then-powerful Fordham (where he was one of the ‘blocks of granite’) and coaching stints with Red Blaik’s Army and the New York Giants (alongside fellow assistant Tom Landry), such that his bloodlines were notable. Author Maraniss also notes often that Lombardi was friendly with many of the leading sportswriters / myth makers of the era — without saying whether that was product of his success or something he sought out. A stout Jesuit, Lombardi believed in presenting information at a pace so that the slowest in the group could understand, and in a menu of few plays with many options, drilled incessantly until execution was innate. The most famous of these was the sweep. At Green Bay, his success catapulted him into the realm of business leadership. The standard seven themes of his addresses: 1) pay the price, 2) the value of competition, 3) commitment to personal excellence, 4) more authority, less freedom (in reference to the tumultuous 1960s), 5) effective leaders are disciplined and impart that trait, 6) leaders are made, and most of all 7) character is a habit superimposed on temperament, and will is character in action. Maraniss cannot resist a bit of postmodern-inspired exploration of the gap between reality and popular understandings (or ‘myth’), as if this discord is not inevitably the case and indeed the very purpose of biography. A fine work on an interesting fellow.
3. MacCambridge, America’s Game (~ Feb 2005)
Shows how pro football surpassed college gridiron and then baseball to become America’s leading sport. Key to the league’s success was its collegial business administration. For example, TV revenues are pooled and shared, so that competitive merit is the distinguishing characteristic. In earlier postwar years, visiting teams received a share of the gate. The chronology includes closeup views of the Rams, Browns, Colts, Cowboys, Chiefs, and Raiders. Technology and savvy use of electronic media played a key role, as did the accidental commissioner Pete Rozelle. TV, including Monday Night Football, also was a key driver — the NFL supplanted boxing and mastered the medium long before baseball grasped the possibilities. Football gained from the shifting cultural mores of the 1960s, but did not escape labor problems of the 1980s and 90s. The draft remains a key source of talent and public interest, although the rival AFL used superabundance of talent (athletes) to its advantage. The NFL now is an economic and social phenomenon as much as it is a sporting contest.